Storing and safeguarding electronic data is of paramount importance in modern business. Accordingly, various systems may be employed to protect such electronic data.
For example, storage networks may be employed that contain multiple storage devices. Storage networks may provide some level of redundancy by use of mirrored or redundant components (e.g., disk drives, disk controllers, power supplies and/or fans), each of which may be hot-swappable to avoid downtime.
Storage networks may fall into a plurality of categories, such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN). A NAS system may be a stand-alone, network-accessible, hard disk storage system that may provide file-level access to electronic data. A SAN array may be a dedicated storage system that may connect numerous storage resources to one or many servers. A SAN may provide block-level access to electronic data through one or more SCSI-based protocols (e.g., Fiber Channel and iSCSI).
The use of solid-state storage devices within such storage networks is increasing in popularity. A solid state storage device is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data. A solid-state storage device may emulate (and therefore replace) a conventional hard disk drive. Additionally/alternatively, a solid state storage device may be used within a cache memory system included within the storage network.
With no moving parts, a solid-state disk drive largely eliminates (or greatly reduces) seek time, latency and other electromechanical delays and failures associated with a conventional hard disk drive.